Book Image

Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5

By : Stuart Butler, Tom Oliver
3.5 (2)
Book Image

Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5

3.5 (2)
By: Stuart Butler, Tom Oliver

Overview of this book

Design patterns serve as a toolkit of techniques and practices that enable you to write code that’s not only faster, but also more manageable. With this book, you’ll explore a range of design patterns and learn how to apply them to projects developed in Unreal Engine 5. You’ll begin by delving into the foundational principles of coding and develop a solid understanding of the concepts, challenges, and benefits of using patterns in your code. As you progress, you’ll identify patterns that are woven into the core of Unreal Engine 5 such as Double Buffer, Flyweight, and Spatial Partitioning, followed by some of the existing tool sets that embody patterns in their design and usage including Component, Behavior Tree, and Update. In the next section of the book, you’ll start developing a series of gameplay use cases in C++ to implement a variety of design patterns such as Interface and Event-based Observers to build a decoupled communications hierarchy. You’ll also work with Singleton, Command, and State, along with Behavioral Patterns, Template, Subclass Sandbox, and Type Object. The final section focuses on using design patterns for optimization, covering Dirty Flag, Data Locality, and Object Pooling. By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in designing systems with the perfect C++/Blueprint blend for maintainable and scalable systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1:Learning from Unreal Engine 5
6
Part 2: Anonymous Modular Design
10
Part 3: Building on Top of Unreal

Technical requirements

For this chapter, you will need a blank UE5 project open and ready. There's no need for C++ right now; we’ll be focusing on Blueprint code for simplicity.

The files for this project can be found in the chapter2 branch on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Game-Development-Patterns-with-Unreal-Engine-5/tree/main/Chapter02

If you’ve not created a blank UE5 project before, the following steps will take you through creating a simple Blueprint project, which is all we need for this chapter:

  1. Click the Launch button in the top right of the Epic Launcher | Unreal Engine | Library tab, where we installed the engine in the first chapter.
  2. Select Games on the left side of the Unreal Project Browser.
  3. Select Blank from the main section, and toggle Starter Content off. This will prevent Unreal from adding a bunch of unrequired assets to the project.
  4. Choose a sensible location (the default is fine) and set the project name...